


aegri somnia

by jeweleeah



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Catholic Imagery, Love Letters, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, maybe slightly self indulgent use of:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 09:17:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16194599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeweleeah/pseuds/jeweleeah
Summary: I guess the difference is, I was ruined before this began. I can’t do that to you, I never could. I’m too far down this road now, maybe I always have been. To dig you out of my heart would be to sever it completely, and I’m yours until you won’t have me any longer.





	aegri somnia

**Author's Note:**

> these are warm-ups / outtakes from something else I'm working on, that I ultimately decided to cut. 
> 
> the title is latin and comes from Horace, and translates to "a sick man's dreams". 
> 
> enjoy!

_Who are you?_

_Steve? Yes. Captain America? I suppose, though I never liked him much. The little shit who got his ass kicked so regularly you’d have thought he enjoyed it? Yeah, maybe, somewhere inside - nowadays people take one look at you and decide that’s a fight they don’t wanna lose._

_(I wonder if you miss it, the fight. Wonder if it misses you.)_

_I’m not looking for a name. I know yours, can hardly believe I ever forgot it. Like forgetting my own head behind on the ground, somewhere. Impossible, an alienation of the self._

_But, who are you, under your skin, under the sinew, under all that holy blood? Who are you in the split-open marrow of your bones? Are you who you were? I’m certainly not. What the world has done to us is so dark even I can’t speak it, not fully._

_How has this world changed you? Where do the old cracks meet the new? What flashes behind your eyes before you wake up screaming? If I were to root around inside you, what would I find?_

_What is it that you think of me now?_

_I loved you, I hope you know. God, did I love you. You told me once - I don’t think you know that I know, it was some half-drunk confession in the whisper-dark night, pressed up against my hair when you thought I was asleep. But you told me that I was the world to you._

_I almost laughed, at the time._

_Because, God, that doesn’t even begin to cut it. You spun me the fucking universe, Stevie, I was nothing without you. I worshiped the fucking ground you walked on. Go ahead, call me a sinner, call me a heathen - my whole existence began and ended with your bird-boned frame, and I never would have chosen a different altar to kneel before. Bucky Barnes, sole parishioner of the Church of Steve Rogers until god damned 1943._

_Then, of course, there was a whole new influx of devotees. All of them too dumb and blind to see they worshiped a false God. They never knew you, Stevie, never will. Me and my swiss-cheese brain are the only people on this whole rotten earth who know who you are._

_Only I cleaned all your stubborn wounds, only I held you all night after your Ma passed, only I kept watch while you beat back the angels every winter, as they tried to steal you back to heaven when you got sick._

_You, my rogue angel, my unyielding miracle - you gaveth, and you tooketh away, and I watched every blood stained moment with baited breath. I’ve lived and killed and died and lived again, all for you. That’s devotion in it’s purest form, so help me. Every shot of the rifle, every time bullet met brain, every sickening crunch of bone - I was praying. Don’t you understand, Stevie?_ I was praying.

_The altar at which I kneel is eternal, unforgiving and true. And sweetheart, it’s soaked to the center with blood._

_So, who are you?_

_I guess the answer is simple, in the end. That which I cannot exist without._

*****

_Some days, you look at me like I’m a ghost._

_It’s quick, you think I don’t catch it - the way shock lights up behind your pretty eyes (always did have the prettiest eyes, bluer than any dames, and those damn fuck-me lashes, too), how you look me up and down (quickly, can’t have me catchin, like I’m not staring at your ass every time you bend over), just to make sure I’m really there, how you have to make some excuse to touch me after it happens (like you're inconveniencing me, like I’m not dead all the while you’re not touching me)._

_Would it kill you if I told you I love it?_

_Because, darlin, that’s what I am. Less than a ghost, really. Some of idea of a man strung through time and hell, held together by your existence alone._

_Wanna just take you by the shoulders and shake you and scream it at you till you get it, sometimes. Like when you go jumping outta planes with no chute, or take a hit you didn’t need to, just because you can. If you go, I go. Nobody left to keep me bound. I’m haunting this world just for, baby._

_But in these moments, you can see me, truly. Just meat and bones and too much blood._

_I’m no good, Stevie. You know that, somewhere in that holy chest. You read the file, you know the numbers, you can’t forget that. Nobody can._

_Sure, they cut me open again and again, threw my brain in the fryer and stuffed it back in, froze me half way to hell for years at a time._

_I’m the one who killed those people, though._

_The worst part of it? Do you wanna know? I don’t know if you do._

_The worst part, dollface, is that those fuckers didn’t make the thing that killed those people. Every perfect shot, every throat running red with blood, every crying child who ended up with a bullet in their tiny tiny skull?_

_That’s been me all along._

_You know that. It’s why you can see me. You knew it, in the war. ( ~~The first war.~~ First war? All wars are the same war.) Saw it creeping up my shadow, all fangs and claws and unholy rot. A monster of my own creation. This shit’s been inside me my whole life, every one of them. You think you were the rambunctious one? You never considered I got my rocks off - comin in, saving your pretty ass, beating the shit out some punk cause I finally had a reason? You don’t think I found the face of God every time I shot lead square between some Nazis eyebrows?_

_You’re the only god I’ll serve, but violence has had a claim on me since the day I came screaming out the womb._

_She fills my chest like a flood, violence does, and I keep waiting for the day the gates break. It ain’t gonna be pretty. I know what I’m capable of, but you do too, and when you see me for the ghost I am, I feel like sometimes you can hear the warning sirens, too._

_Not to mention all the blood. I’m surprised you can’t see it - you’re swimming in it every time you come near me. Surprised you can’t smell it, taste it. You remember the taste of blood, Stevie? I mean really remember - when you’re so soaked to the bone you can’t even tell if it’s your blood or theirs, when you find pieces of strange flesh on you hours after the fact, when it’s been in your mouth so long you start to enjoy the taste, just a little._

_Don’t think I’ll ever be able to get the taste out of my mouth. Don’t know much that I want to._

_Some day, I keep telling myself, you’ll finally taste the blood, see the ghost, hear those flood sirens wail. You’ll know, finally, who I am, and you’ll cast me down._

_Let me rot, sweetheart, hell’s been calling my name for seventy five years. It’s time for me to go home._

*****

_What do you dream about?_

_I only ask because I can’t sleep and the clock keeps ticking and I can hear your snoring from down the hall, and I miss dreaming._

_I don’t, anymore, have I told you that? Not in that sense, at least. It’s all fogged over memories and the smell of gunpowder, it’s just my brain trying to fill these holes that I don’t think will ever close._

_What are you dreaming, sweetheart?_

_Do you ever dream me of me?_

_And I mean me, not him. I know you dream of him, sometimes you wake up and come downstairs with this beautiful little smile, and I can almost see him over your shoulder, grinning at me all smug -_ look, you unholy thing _, he says,_ he’s always going to dream of me, I’m the man you will never be, dead in a ditch and half a world away and I still got his heart locked up in my chest. You’re never getting it back.

_A ghost, haunted. Funny, almost._

_I wear his face and name like a mask and I live in this stolen love that I can’t speak, and Stevie, all I ask is someday maybe you’ll dream of me._

_If I could dream, I would dream about your hands, I think. Always loved your hands, thin and graceful and so, so sure, covered in charcoal and your own stubborn blood - broad and strong, calloused and true, carrying the world on your shoulders, but they never shake._

_If I could dream, I could make my home inside you, right in your very core. You’d swallow me up and this impostor heart could be where it’s meant to be. In my dream you choose me, you leave him where he lies. In this dream, I am enough. My blood and your tears and fields and fields of flowers._

_If I could dream, I could finally be rid of this ever creeping cold, soak up all your light, all your truth, all the poetry written in every curve of your flesh. Laurel wreathed and chiseled from marble, bringer of death and song - how people don’t hear the lyres play as you walk by, I’ll never know._

_(My Atlas, my Adonis, my Apollo.)_

_This isn’t a dream, anymore, it’s a prayer: I just need you to touch me._

_I could never ask that of you._

_Oh, but baby, baby, baby, I can’t get it out this half-cracked mind of mine. That’s just not how these things end, though. I know that, you think I don’t? You don’t touch me, you never will. Nothing I could ever do would make me worthy of that._

_You touch me, and the sun goes black, the world breaks apart. You touch me, and you’ll finally know that I’m not him._

_But in this dream of mine, in another life, in some world where the hounds of hell aren’t snapping at my heels, maybe you touch me, and you know I’m not him, but you don’t stop. Maybe you touch me and touch me and touch me, break me down till I come apart in your immortal hands, and you fit the pieces back together into something that works, something that isn’t cursed beyond blessing._

_Not to say you haven’t touched me, not to say I don’t remember every small moment in the most vivid of detail. Your hand on my shoulder, on my neck, on the small of my back - casual, always so casual, and it rips me apart from the inside._

_Truth be told, I can barely breathe without it, set adrift with no light to navigate by - but you, you bring the light where ever you go. You light me up like I’m more than just dirt and blood and bone._

_But how much more can a broken thing be ripped apart until there’s nothing left?_

_And me, selfish thing that I am, I know if you were to touch me - truly, unrepentantly, the way you do in these imagined dreams - I would never be able to stop you. Your hands and your mouth and your unyielding warmth, I know they can’t save me. But when I get to thinking about it, I can’t help but wonder what the harm in trying is._

_What would you dream about, if you dreamt of me?_

_I know it’s not fair, standing in front of you in this dead body and calling your name with some long gone voice, must cross some wires, set some signals off wrong. An unfair advantage, I’m playing with - you loved him, you_ loved _him - but please, Stevie, all I ask, is if maybe someday you could love me too._

_I’d ruin you, God, I’d ruin you - but can’t you see that all this negative space between us has ruined me too?_

_I guess the difference is, I was ruined before this began. I can’t do that to you, I never could. I’m too far down this road now, maybe I always have been. To dig you out of my heart would be to sever it completely, and I’m yours until you won’t have me any longer._

_The birds are singing now. The sun will rise, soon. You dream your hazy dreams of him, my love. I’ll be here when you wake._

_My time for dreaming is done._

*****

_Please don’t look at me like that._

_Like I’m real, like I’m here, like you could ever love me._

_You don’t know what you do to me, with your looking. You can’t know, how could you?_

_This corpse is no place to call home. Don’t go building houses on battlefields, sweetheart, that alone should be obvious to you._

_I’ve been trying to tell you, but you won’t god damned listen. You call me his name and look at his face and love me like I’m him. Stealing from a dead man, in such a complete fashion, is low, even for me._

_The sky may be empty, and the only angel here on earth with me, but I’ve got nothing waiting on the other side of this half life but hell. Don’t go around offering your salvation when you can’t follow through. Can’t a dead man be comfortable in the eternity that is waiting for him, that is deserved?_

*****

_Why do you call me that?_

Bucky.

_Like I’m still him. Like I could ever be him again._

_You kissed me,_ you kissed me _, and it was like being born all over again._

_(You think James Barnes would ever forget how you taste? That’s blasphemy in the highest form, sweetheart. I can feel him rolling in the grave I left him in.)_

_This is something new, something pure, something me and this soot black soul have no business in._

_I hate him, just a little. Not that I could ever tell you that. This_ Bucky _, whose name you whisper in your sleep, whose eyes you think you’re looking into when I got_ my _mouth wrapped around your cock, who you thought you found on the bridge._

_You may have called his name, but I’m who came out of the ether, darling. Zero return policy._

_I’m just some possessed corpse dancing the line between Lazarus and damnation, and I’m pretty sure which way I’m gonna fall._

_There are days I blame you. You can’t go around saying peoples names like that, Steve, summoning their fucking soul from the pits of hell with the sound of your voice. Abuse of power, it must be. Dead things like me should stay that way. You shouldn’t just steal a rib out your own chest and make me anew, doesn’t matter that I’ll always come when you call._

_But you didn’t get him, you got me. James Barnes has been dead since 1944, but I’ll play pretend for as long as you like. I’d be anybody for you, even him._

_Don’t know if you’ll ever understand, what I’d do for you._

_Maybe me and him are made of more of the same stuff than I realize. If I know one thing about your_ Bucky _, is even he’d put on this ghost-show act for you. I am the shadow of the shadow of your shadow. Every cell in this rotten piece of flesh hums at the same frequency as your own. Maybe I’m the thief, here. Living in a stolen body with a stolen love and orbiting around you like the earth to the sun, disgracing any of the good your Bucky ever was._

_Every time you bring up another memory of you and him, I feel a piece of me fall back to hell. Don’t know how many pieces are left. This body is a circus-act of lies, and I know someday soon you’re gonna be talking about him but looking at me and finally see the difference._

_Is it selfish, to want to stay here with you?_

_Yeah, but I couldn’t care if I wanted to. Here, with you, there’s all this sunlight, Stevie. Don’t know if I ever felt the sun before I met you. Can’t recall if there was feeling at all. I know what you’re thinking, but pain like that isn’t feeling, it’s your soul being swallowed whole by the devil himself. I dealt with plenty of pain, baby, but I never felt before you._

_Your_ Bucky _felt the same way. Told his Ma once that you made the world make sense. About as close as you can get, for a six year old boy, I think._

_When I said devotion, Stevie, I fucking meant it. I might not be that first man who knelt at your altar, but I’ll sure as anything be the last._

_Maybe you don’t think I’m him, maybe you think someday I will be._

_Or, maybe, you aren’t paying attention at all, maybe you’re off in your own little world where I’m still him. Otherwise, I don’t know how you think I could be him at all, really. I can’t get the accent right, can’t remember half the shit you try to get me to remember._

_Anything left of him in this body is that which was attuned to you. I am a being remade in your image, just the dust of the earth spun into a shape you might want._

_And you want him, of course you do. The only thing I can't give you._

_I’m gonna ruin you, sweetheart. Seems impossible, maybe it almost is, but if you’re every good, worthwhile thing on this shitty rock all pulled together, I’m nothing more than the refuse of what’s left. Not even all your good can outweigh that much rot._

_Sometimes, I want to - ruin you, that is. Drag you you down to my level and live in the mud, here, together. But you got wings as white as the noon-bright sky, and I’ve no right to sully those up. I know that, but I still want to, I still would if I didn’t think it would incur the direct wrath of heaven._

_I’m selfish, yeah, I am selfish. I got me an angel, all to myself, and God himself will have to leave heaven to get you back from me._

 

**Author's Note:**

> 3 things:
> 
> 1) "All wars are the same war" is not my line, it comes from the Richard Siken poem "War of the Foxes", from the collection by the same name. if you have not read it, I am literally begging you to. I'll leave a link to the poem at the end, but the collection itself is my favorite thing I have ever read. I just thought it fit. 
> 
> 2) this is obviously not a healthy view of another person in a relationship or yourself blah blah blah. leave the traumatized boy alone, he's trying. don't idolize the people you love. 
> 
> 3) i might? add a second chapter to this, possibly of steve's pov if people are interested (if so! please lmk that you are!) otherwise, take the 1/2 chapters w grain of salt. 
> 
> thanks for reading!!! kudos and comments are appreciated but so are you!!!!
> 
> War of the Foxes, by Richard Siken: https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/4220


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